Magnificent Obsessions: The Films of Douglas Sirk
SFF invites you to flounce down a sweeping staircase
past a patently-fake vista and into five of the best 1950s
Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk. Commercial successes for
Universal Studios, they were critically maligned at the time.
Reinterpreted by filmmakers from Reiner Werner Fassbinder (Fear
Eats the Soul) to Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), and
reclaimed by feminist and neo-Marxist critics in the 70s and 80s
for their social critiques, they remain pervasively influential,
with hit TV series Mad Men also drawing deep from the
Sirkian well of stylistic excesses, loaded subtexts and shimmering
surfaces.
Douglas Sirk's 1954 romantic drama of conflicted but ultimately
redemptive passions brought Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson together for
the first time.
Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson star in Douglas Sirk's heady 1955
melodrama. Can a man and woman from different ends of the social
ladder find romance?
Douglas Sirk's resonant 1956 melodrama about a hemmed-in family
man (Fred MacMurray) drawn to a cosmopolitan former flame (Barbara
Stanwyck).
Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Rock Hudson and the Oscar®-winning Dorothy Malone star in
Douglas Sirk's combustible 1956 melodrama about a troubled Texas
oil dynasty.
Douglas Sirk's glorious melodrama of extravagant emotions
explores the tensions in mother-daughter relationships; this 1959
hit was a comeback for star Lana Turner.